1. Jana Sterbak
Remote Control I and
Remote Control II show Sterbak’s
interest in the body and how you can restrict a female while taking away her
power. Created in the form of an 1800’s
crinoline, the piece holds the female in a rigid position where she is
suspended while her feet can’t touch the ground. The piece is placed on wheels with a remote
that guides the piece and the wearer around a space. By placing yourself into the piece you are
giving up control of yourself to whomever holds the remote.
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| Remote Control II |
2. Matthew Barney
Barney created a series called CREMASTER cycle; an 8 year project documenting his artist
exploration of cremation. Using video,
Barney perfects the sculpture position, lighting, size and shape; documenting the
transformation he has created to his body and others for the end product of
sculpture. His use of the body involves
dressing it in clothing appropriate to the vision of the person as well as morphing
the face into creatures that resemble anything from mythical to an animal. The people as props range from a Satan to a
female cheetah, dressed to covered nakedness, erasing of the genitalia, or just
projecting the genitalia into something different. His work was pretty creepy to me with a
surreal and eerie feeling, almost demonic.
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| CREMASTER 5 |
3. Janine Antoni
Antoni is a contemporary artist who has been known to use
parts of her body as tools in the creation of her work. In her past pieces, she’s used her eyelashes,
mouth, hair, and even her brain with the use of technological scanning. Her piece Butterfly
Kisses was comprised by using her eyelashes as the tool, fluttering mascara
marks onto a canvas in an abstract pattern.
In Loving Care she uses her
hair as her tool, dipping it into a bucket of Loving Care black hair dye and mopping
the gallery floor from her hands and knees creating more of a performance
art. Her pieces convey power,
femininity, and an abstract form, but you can definitely say it’s not static.
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| Butterfly Kisses |
4. Paul Thek
Paul Thek explores the body in his work by creating hyper
realistic body parts out of wax. His pieces
in Relics consist of cast versions
of his own body parts, such as an arm, encased in Plexiglas. Thek also created pieces that resembled the
body from the inside like organs or muscle.
My thoughts on Thek’s work is that he was trying to show the healthiness
of the body ~ parts that weren't sick from the AIDS disease that attributed to his
death. I think he wanted to show himself
as more, more than the disease, more than the artist. A person with individual limbs that were
strong and healthy, and organs that could sustain the disease, even as they
weren't sustaining him within his own body.
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| Warrior's Arm |
5. Robert Gober
Like Thek, Robert Gober is known to replicate body parts for
his installations. His realistic
representation of the male leg shows the leg, typically protruding from a solid
space such as a wall lying on the ground with the foot pointed up. The leg is created from beeswax, with a pant
leg that partially covers the leg enabling you to still see the sock and leg
hair that is created from real human hair.
As a final touch to the leg, Gober places a shoe on the foot, a dressier
style shoe worn in a professional setting.
Opposite to his leg installations, the work that includes the male torso
is more random. In the leg installations,
the leg always has a sock and shoe placed on them, and almost always has a pant
leg (the exception is Untitled (Man
Coming out of a Woman), where the leg is between a woman’s thighs, alluding
to it coming from the womb). Sometimes
the torso is covered in clothing (pants, socks, and shoes), and sometimes it’s
not. The solid space the torso protrudes
from can be a wall, antique sink, even a bathtub with the knees bent and the
feet resting on the bottom. While Gober
does have other pieces of work showing other parts of the body, I felt that his
work with the leg was something that he recreated over and over.
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| Untitled (Man Coming out of Woman) |
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